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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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I've actively experimented with this, and it's one of my vibes benchmarks for any new model release.

Of course, my standards were that it should pass my own sniff test. That roughly amounts to "does that sound like me?" and "are those the kinds of arguments I'd make?". They do a decent job, and have for a while. Not perfect, but good enough to fool most of the people, most of the time.

Huh. It's been my sniff test for new models as well, and so far I have not seen much success. It should be easy! This is literally the most LLM-flavored task to ever task! And yet. I've sunk probably 50 hours into it.

My most recent attempt, which I sunk about 10 hours and $100 into, and which got a lot closer than any previous attempts, involved giving Claude a corpus of all my past writing and having it try multiple different ways of producing text on arbitrary topics in my voice. The things tried were

  • Just throw a lot of writing samples and ask it to write in the same voice (just sounded like standard generic Claude)
  • Take 5 of my writing samples, come up with plausible prompts to generate them, throw them in llama-405b base (hyperbolic) in format [>prompt>...>/prompt>>response>my_sample>/response>] x5 followed by >prompt>[the real prompt>/prompt>>response> (didn't follow prompt, broke with my writing style fairly early)
  • That, but doing a product-of-experts thing with multiple continuations (same result, if anything a little worse)
  • Standard SFT on my voice (gets the texture of my writing right, but can't maintain coherence for more than a sentence or two, if trained for more epochs just memorizes the things I've written and ignores the prompts)
  • Took a bunch of my writing samples, flattened them by "rewriting them to sound better", SFT on task of reversing that i.e. "here is an AI generated passage [slopified original]. Rewrite it in faul_sname's voice: [original passage I wrote]" (kinda sounds like me if I was actively having a stroke)
  • Same but DPO instead of SFT (different kind of stroke)
  • Clever-sounding GAN setup (couldn't get it working, gave up after a few hours)

On the one hand, I was very impressed by how good Claude was at running a whole bunch of these experiments very quickly. On the other hand, it did not work for me, not even at the level of "passes the sniff test", much less at the level of "standard stylometry techniques say it sounds like me".

[A corpus of all my past writing] would be an absolute pain to collate, both for me and for Claude

I think you'll find that this is one of the tasks that is now much much easier. It's actually been within the capabilities of frontier models since Sonnet 4.0 (which is when I went ahead and gathered said corpus, on the theory that it'd be pretty useful to have). The prompt you're looking for is something like "Here's a chrome instance running with --remote-debugging-port and logged in on most of the sites I post on with a tab open for each. Go generate a corpus of all my publicly available writing".

Would you be willing to pay for that or provide access

Yeah. An H100 for 24h would run in the ballpark of $40, well worth it for me to provide. Vast allows transferring credits from one account to another, so I'd happily just transfer $50 of credits over if someone actually wants to do this. Does seem like rather a lot of work though.

We'd need to decide if I'm allowed to use LLMs myself, in the same manner I already do. Claude wouldn't get the benefit of me giving it feedback or editing its output in any capacity

Yeah, that's entirely reasonable. Your voice is very different from Claude's voice.

Do you really need us for the test, beyond whatever blinding or scraping of my writing is necessary?

Yeah, I'm hoping you can prove me wrong here. I've been trying to do this since back in late 2019 when nostalgebraist-autoresponder was shiny and new. I want a good simulacrum of myself! I want to have that simulacrum, and I want to loom it. I want to build an exobrain, and merge with it, and fork off a copy running in the cloud.

BTW I expect there's a substantial market for anyone who manages to build this in a repeatable way. I've looked, and there are as of now no commercial offerings for this (though there are a few commercial offerings that pretend to be this).

I'd struggle to pin you as a moderate either, though I can't recall you expressing strong opinions that aren't more research/alignment oriented. If my hunch is true, then you aren't the target audience for this! Plus I'll eat my hat if you don't already have access to the best models out there.

I only have access to the models you can obtain access to with money - I expect I'm 3-6 months behind the best of what insiders at Anthropic or OAI have access to.

I don't think I'd describe you as an LLM skeptic

An LLM skeptic is an LLM idealist who's been disappointed :)

Also, this is slightly off-topic. We're not evaluating the agents on their ability to write code, we're testing their ability to mimic me convincingly.

I expect looking like you stylometrically while also exhibiting the same patterns of thought you exhibit on a specific topic will involve writing code. But code in the service of trying to mimic you convincingly, rather than in the service of producing some specific durable software artifact.

For the record, I do expect this to be within the capability window within the next 18 months, but I would be pretty surprised if you managed to get Opus 4.6 specifically to do it.

I think we're on the same page here, I'll talk to SF about this. I'm willing to put in the effort on my end, which, as I see it, is to write a 1000 word essay as I normally would. Not particularly onerous.

Let me give you an idea of how I normally approach this. I simply copy-paste pages of my profile after sorting by top, usually at least two or three pages (45k tokens). I might also share a few "normal" pages in chronological order, for the sake of diversity if nothing else.

I did just this, using Gemini 3.1 Pro on AI Studio (GPT 5.2 Thinking, which I pay for, can't write in arbitrary styles nearly as well no matter how hard you try, and I've tried a lot, I don't pay for Claude so I'm stuck with Sonnet):

I copied and pasted the first two profile pages, sorting by top of all time. Instructions were:

Your task is to write a 1000 word essay in the exact style and voice of self_made_human, on a topic of your choice (heavily informed by what you think he'd choose).

https://rentry.co/23dc63vs by Gemini https://rentry.co/p5yh68zu by Claude 4.6 Sonnet (same setup)

Results? I'd grade Gemini a 7/10, Claude a 5/10.

Looking at Gemini:

  • It captures the way I'd write in an "academic register", namely when I'm trying very hard to be polished, and that includes heavy LLM use. It's not "raw self_made_human", because I increasingly do not post raw, minimally edited posts.
  • It uses em-dashes. I do not, as a general rule, mostly because people are on a hair-string trigger. Shame, I think they're neat.
  • The exact circumstances are obviously fictional. Can't expect otherwise, can we?
  • Otherwise very good! I would write a story like that. I've seen patients just like that. It captures my transhumanist outlook and my love/hate relationship with medicine.
  • I can see it overindexing on random biographical tidbits. My grandpa? Relevant.

Looking closer:

which is a damn sight better than sitting in a soiled diaper in a Bromley care home, screaming at a nurse because you think you're back in the Blitz.

I don't live or work near Bromley. That's where an uncle of mine resides. It's clear from the context I shared that I'm up in Scotland.

I will happily roll the dice on a 30% chance of AGI-induced extinction if it buys me a 70% chance of reaching escape velocity. Give me the ASI. Let it fold our proteins and solve cellular senescence. If it kills us, at least it will likely be fast, clean, and computationally elegant—which is a damn sight better than sitting in a soiled diaper in a Bromley care home, screaming at a nurse because you think you're back in the Blitz.

I could see myself saying this. Maybe not those exact figures, perhaps 10%:90%, but directionally correct.

We have, as a civilization, achieved a horrific kind of half-victory. Modern medicine—my profession, which I love and despise in equal measure—has become incredibly adept at preventing you from dying. We can stent your coronaries, dialyze your kidneys, and pump you full of broad-spectrum antibiotics. We have defeated the acute killers that historically pruned the human herd. But we have utterly failed to extend healthspan in tandem with lifespan. We have built a remarkably efficient pipeline that funnels the elderly past the quick, clean deaths of yesteryear and deposits them directly into a decades-long purgatory of cognitive and physical decay.

And the NHS, Moloch bless its sclerotic, crumbling heart, is entirely unprepared for the demographic tsunami that is already making landfall. We are warehousing hollowed-out shells of human beings in care homes at exorbitant expense, draining the wealth of the middle class to fund the agonizingly slow dissolution of their parents.

Very good. I would use that verbatim in a real essay.

People look at my bio—amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi (attain immortality, or die trying)—and assume I am driven by a narcissistic fear of death. They wheel out the tired, poetic cope that "death gives life meaning," that finitude is the necessary canvas upon which human beauty is painted.

I wouldn't say that at all dawg. Why would I randomly reference my user flair in an essay?

Claude's version is shit. It's staggeringly content free, and while it's closer to "raw" me, it also uses em-dashes and uses many words to say few things. Maybe it's bad luck, I've had better results in the past, especially since I usually share a specific topic instead of letting it decide on its own.

Here is the whole prompt, profile dump included, if you want to try with a different model. I'll see about using Opus, I know 5.2 Thinking will shit the bed in a stylistic sense.

Rentry won't let me paste the whole thing. But I think I've been clear enough to reproduce independently. I'll happily take a look.

Gemini's sample is impressive! Color me impressed, especially that a straight-up prompt produced that (though I suppose if any technique would get it with current models, it'd be "one shotting through a prompt" rather than "iterative refinement towards a target").

It doesn't sound quite the same as the version of you that lives in my head, but it's awfully close. E.g. I can't imagine you saying

Arthur's tau proteins and beta-amyloid plaques have reached a critical threshold

since you don't tend to drop spurious technical details into your walls of text unless they serve a purpose (and also because I half suspect you're not a fan of the amyloid theory of alzheimers). More generally, the Gemini piece has a higher density of eyeball kicks than I model your writing as having. And I model your writing as having a lot of those, for a human.

It also seems to drift away from your voice in the second half. And it fails the stylometry vibe check - Pangram detects AI with medium confidence - but maybe in a way that's reparable. And actual stylometry (cohens d of +17 on dashes, +2 on words >9 letters, +1.5 on mean word length in general, -2 on 3-4 letter words, -1.2 on punctuation in general - i.e. you use more and more varied punctuation and shorter words, by a notable margin, and Gemini uses way, way, way more dashes). Still, it's much much better than I expected! (and yeah, the Claude one is not even worth discussing)

Interestingly, your results look much, much better to me than the ones I get myself. I ran the same test as you did against Gemini, and got these not-very-good attempts: 1 2 3. Gemini took distinctive phrases (e.g. "85% agree") and ideas (e.g. "claude code as supply chain risk") I have used once in the corpus, fixated on them, and stitched them together into a skinsuit which superficially resembles my writing but doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Interestingly, that's a very base model flavored failure mode. I have grown unused to seeing base-model-flavored failure modes, and as such Gemini is much more interesting to me now.

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